Overcoming the Challenge of Delivering Great Multi-Cultural Customer Experiences

Consistent delivery of a great customer experience in a multi-market, multi-cultural environment is a multi-faceted challenge. The specifics that define a great customer experience vary by country; but universally, when customers are delighted, they increasingly return, become brand loyalists and tell their friends, colleagues and families.

With over 11 years’ experience working with leading global brands, Empathica (a Mindshare Technologies Company) has identified the core elements of successful international Customer Experience Management (CEM) programmes that drive business improvement and customer loyalty. Here I share some of the key lessons we’ve learned to help you to prepare a successful CEM programme to deliver great cross border customer experiences:

1. Recognise that global brands are delivered locally

Even if the brand is global in its appeal, customers experience that brand differently from country to country. Service expectations between cultures and markets are different; behaviour standards that may make sense in head office may be ineffective (or even insulting) in other markets around the world. For example, mandating an American-style hearty hello to dining guests as they enter a restaurant might feel forced and inappropriate in other, more restrained countries.
It is crucial to listen to the local markets and their expectations, because even the best locally-adapted product can be damaged if delivered in context of a poor overall experience.  And that impacts the global brand.

2. Build the optimal programme under the opportunities and challenges of each market

To manage a business globally, being able to compare performance across locations and countries is crucial. But some businesses make a mistake in trying to make all things the same. In global CEM, there are multiple layers of challenges – from differences in technological capabilities and readiness to adopt customer experience strategies to cultural restrictions.

At Empathica, we assess market readiness carefully in designing a global programme.  What is crucial to the programme design is to understand what drives successful adoption within the particular brand and build on the type of introduction that works in that business.

3. Design the programme to be culturally relevant across all markets

CEM programmes need to be as sensitive to local markets as the service delivery is. For example, the method of invitation and the incentive for participation offered are crucial components in engaging each market. One way to maximise the programme’s consistency is to strive for functional equivalency – keep to a core design that ‘flexes’ to respond to local market requirements.

In order to manage business globally, comparisons across markets have to be meaningful. Research-driven global insights and measurement of global progress require a consistent framework to assess change. In order to provide that consistent core, we design multi-market programmes to be ‘functionally equivalent’ because sometimes the best of intentions can go awry. Consistent research methodology would require that all markets use the same incentive for participation. But what might encourage customer engagement in one market might drive discomfort in another. To maintain cultural relevance, you may need to adjust the programme design when necessary. In those cases, offering a similar, but not necessarily identical, incentive can help the programme thrive.

4. Translations are just the beginning of localisation

It is essential to engage your customers in the language of the location – don’t just translate the right words, use the right tone. And it’s not just the words and tone that you need to consider.  The cultural impact on scoring patterns is a much researched topic and one of subtle complexity. On a 5-point scale – with 5 being the best score, does a 4 mean the same thing in Germany, Japan and Mexico? Unlike in the UK, German schools use a rating system in which a 1 is best score, but a score of 5 would be near failing. It’s just as easy to invert the scale in the markets like Germany for whom a 1 is the highest performance. It’s knowing where changes like that need to happen that is crucial to the programme’s success.

5. Remember it’s not about the number

Once you’re using the right scales, how do you drive improvement? Many businesses want to set a single, global target; but the reality is that goal may be simply out of reach for markets that are ‘hard raters’. The meaningful comparison typically is not the score but the improvement ratio. By targeting a level of improvement (e.g. all markets are expected to improve 6 percentage points in the next year or to outperform the local competitive set), each market can identify ways to drive their improvement within the relevant context.

Testing Times For Improving NHS Patient Experience

Taking a Closer Look at the Latest Government Measure to Improve NHS service delivery

Rising demand for public services, changing population demographics and tightened budgets have transformed the environment in which the public sector operates. The need for a leaner, more efficient public sector means reform is high on the Coalition Government’s agenda. The introduction of the NHS Friends and Family Test earlier this year is the latest example of the increasing emphasis on making public services across the board more customer orientated.

All acute NHS Trusts are now required to ask both inpatients and Emergency Department patients one standard question known as the Friends and Family Test (FFT). The test asks: “How likely are you to recommend us to friends and family if they needed similar care or treatment?” It aims to encourage patient feedback, show patients that their views and experiences matter to the NHS, and improve patient care.

The idea behind the Friends and Family Test — that of providing a simple measure of patient satisfaction across all UK healthcare organisations — is a good one. It is right that healthcare provision should be designed around patients’ needs. Patient feedback provides a great basis to drive improvements. However, collecting robust, comparable data to even a simple question can be harder than it looks.

The government has set a target of a minimum 15% response rate, but this is not yet being achieved by all hospitals required to participate. Even where organisations are achieving the minimum percentage response rate, the actual numbers of patient responses remains very low in some cases. The Department of Health issued response numbers alongside scores earlier this month; however, the point of needing robust response levels was lost in some of the news headlines surrounding this first wave release of FFT scores.

To achieve measures that bear comparison across locations it is essential that, in addition to having a robust sample in every location, the method of measurement is identical too. However, the methodologies being used by different hospitals to conduct the Friends and Family Test vary widely. Methods in use for the test include paper surveys before patients have left the premises, kiosks which could be used by non-patients, issuing voting tokens for patients to post in a box, and more robust methods of collecting the data once the patient has reached home.

These factors mean the data currently being captured is not statistically robust in every case and therefore ‘league table’ style scoring comparing healthcare providers across the UK could be misleading.

While it is still early days for the Friends and Family Test, healthcare trusts striving for increased patient insight in order to improve their service can learn a lot from savvy private businesses, such as retailers and major hospitality brand owners, who are using technology to further exploit the talents of their workforce and build an emotional connection to customers.

Hospital Trusts are mandated to ask just one question. Retailers have learnt that asking the right series of questions allows them to understand how they are doing in looking after their customers across a range of elements that add up to the perfect customer experience. One question gives you a top line measure; the right set of questions allows you to understand how you are doing on the underlying drivers of great experience (why the patient feels and scores like they do) so you can focus your limited resources on making the improvements that will make the most difference to your patients or customers.

Data Integration for a More Detailed View of Your Customer

The mystery of your customer is being solved in pieces.
It’s time to put those pieces together.

Data Divided

Because businesses are divided into departments, so is business data. Although more and more companies are figuring out how to use analytics technology to understand their data, they continue to do it in silos. One team analyzes customer experience data, another team analyzes transactional data, and yet another analyzes operational data.

The Silhouette Method

This is like having each department cast their own light on your customer and learn from the shadow it produces. The basic shape and size of the customer can be obtained from this “silhouette” method, and these individual dimensions can be useful for providing direction to decision makers. Simple, department-specific insights are a good start, but adding more dimensions to your customer view is critical to future success.

For example, using customer survey data alone, your company can build out a strong plan for improving customer service and increasing customer satisfaction. The benefits of department-specific plans like this are real and important, and each department can do something similar.

This helps companies progress via smaller, department-specific strides.

Adding Dimensions

To perform like a top brand—and to gain every advantage you can—departments must stretch beyond their own data. Customer experience leaders shouldn’t just be able to measure and improve the customer experience within survey results—they should be able to quantify the experience-related impact on multiple facets of the business.
Some quick examples:

Reduced Operational Costs

  • Storefront/Retail: Integrate payroll, real estate, transactional, and VoC data to identify whether the extra staffing you are throwing at a particular store—or store type—is, in fact, translating into a better customer experience or better sales.
  • Contact Center: Integrate service levels, hold times, and VoC data to identify whether or not there is a positive impact from staffing up to meeting stricter service levels. If there is no incremental improvement in the customer experience, you are wasting money.

Revenue Generation

Integrate customer segmentation, product, and VoC data to better understand the experiences of your different customer segments. If you find that particular segments are responding better than others to certain services or products, take that data to your marketing partners and launch a more targeted campaign to increase the penetration of those services/products within the most receptive customer segments.

These examples illustrate very simple, but powerful, relationships between multiple data sets. When combined, they can drive improved customer experiences, along with strong business results.
Lead your business out of the shadows and step into the 3D world. Modern display optics have changed. Technology has moved beyond shining a light and casting a shadow, and the same needs to happen with customer experience–related insights and analytics. Today’s most advanced displays rely on a series of lasers and lenses to produce a highly detailed holographic image. That’s essentially what broader data integration does for your company.
By focusing the light of each department and combining compartmentalized data into a common analytics with holistic data visualizations, you will begin to see a more lifelike image of your customer.

Opportunity for Advantage

Today, very few companies are analyzing their data holistically and simultaneously. The opportunity and true potential of analytics technology lies in the integration of multiple streams—customer feedback data, operational data, segmentation, transactional data, etc.—to gain deeper operational insights, incremental gains in ROI, as well as more predictive measurements from the perspective of both action and inaction.

Action, This Day!

The quality of analysis and insights available to companies is not limited by technology. It is limited by data. If you can bring the data together, the insights are yours to use. So do it. This blog post is a call to action. Better yet, this is a flat-out plea to businesses out there in Business Land that are limiting their competitive advantage by maintaining siloed data and analytics.

Step up and start using your data the way it can—and should—be used. Mindshare’s Analytics Team is here to help.

Digital Darwinism and Customer Feedback

We’re living in an age of massive change.

The word “recession” has gone from describing a quarter over quarter decline in GDP to describing the “new normal” ongoing economic outlook.

At the same time, a group of new technologies has gone from novelty to pervasive in the blink of an eye. It was only a few years ago that the original blue Blackberries were the symbol of being a high powered executive. Today everyone from teenagers to seniors are lining up to get their hands on the latest iPhone or Android devices. How everyday people are using these devices to connect and communicate has also gone through a massive change. Facebook has in just a few years gone from a novelty for college kids, to a Hollywood blockbuster, and has now amassed a user base exceeding 1 billion people.

These trends have left many brands reeling.

In fact, the past few years has even seen the demise of some of the most storied brands in business. Changing consumer sentiment and a challenging economy has in some cases caused core customer bases to drift away.

A term that’s emerged to describe this phenomenon is “digital Darwinism”; an age where technology and society have been evolving too quickly for some brands to adapt. The list of casualties is an impressive one. Borders, Blockbuster, Polaroid, Kodak, HMV and others have been unable to keep pace with rapidly changing consumer behaviors and expectations.

An argument could be made that the inability to keep up with drifting customer needs could have been avoided with an increased focus on keeping current with customer sentiment. Dealing with that particular challenge has always been the core objective of any customer feedback program.

However, customer feedback programs themselves must evolve also.

Lead the conversation…

Surveys will always be a key touch point for soliciting feedback from customers.

When it comes to surveys, the feedback you get from customers is only ever as valuable as the questions you ask them. The challenge with gathering the right kinds of data and insights from customer feedback is asking the right questions in the first place. Subtle changes in wording and structure can have a big impact, especially when it comes to driving the focused actions and behaviors that lead to a great customer experience. Often this requires going beyond generic functional questions to more nuanced emotional questions that seek to differentiate the experience from competitors.

Pointed questions can get to the heart of what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong. These types of questions provide specific, structured feedback that provides brands and locations with valuable analytical insight into customer feedback. This pool of structured feedback can be applied against various algorithms to produce a wide variety of specific performance scores. This scoring can act as a baseline to measure past success and forward-looking performance targets.

Follow the buzz…

Customers themselves have driven the growth of a new channel of feedback as well.

In contrast to the structured data provided by customer surveys, unstructured text comments can provide a qualitative view into customer sentiment. On the surface, these qualitative comments may appear more difficult to decipher than structured scored data but by applying appropriate analytical tools, these customer comments may uncover upcoming or unseen trends before the structured feedback. In addition, these customer comments can serve to validate scored data by providing additional qualitative insight.

Understanding these comments takes more than just reading through them one by one.  Natural language processing tools help to decipher what is happening across the full spectrum of feedback by categorizing and analyzing what topics are being discussed, which topics are most positive or negative and what co-occurring topics are being mentioned together.

Keeping pace with your customer’s needs should be a fundamental of business. It’s been said that any business that defines itself by product rather than by customer benefit has a limited lifespan. However, acting on that objective becomes harder and harder every day. A well executed and thought out customer experience management program could be the missing link in achieving that objective.

A Guest Experience Worth Sharing

As I’ve discussed many times before, these days it seems like many brands are fearful of social media and the potential for it to be a channel for consumers to quickly share negative experiences, or one-off incidents of bad employee behavior. Nobody wants to be associated with the next viral video of employee bad behavior or a viral story of product quality issues. You could argue that some of this stems from the general cynicism that seems to have taken over much of the world since we entered this great recession. Lately though, I’ve been noticing an interesting trend of more good news than bad in my social streams. Perhaps people tweeting and sharing more good news than bad is a sign that the economy may finally be pulling out of this never-ending recession.

A case in point is a fantastic story that recently went viral about a simple good deed done by a manager of a Red Robin restaurant.

You can read about it here.

For those of you who may not be familiar with this story, here is the short version.

  • An obviously pregnant woman visited a Red Robin location for dinner
  • The manager noticed her pregnancy and gave her a free meal along with a nice message attached to the receipt wishing her good luck.

A simple gesture, but a gesture that created a story worth telling, and more importantly a story worth sharing.

The reality is that, in the restaurant world, incidents like this happen every day. The nature of dining out is that every restaurant visit should be a special occasion. Whether for the sake of not having to cook on a hectic weeknight, or to celebrate a special occasion such as a birthday, brands need to be able to make every dining experience feel special.

One of the challenges that local restaurant managers have is that with the hustle and bustle of day to day operations it’s difficult to stay on top of staff to ensure they are doing all the little things that make a difference all the time. That’s where the action driving capabilities of today’s CEM solutions can come in to play. These action driving tools are designed to be coaching tools rather than the reporting tools of the past. By providing not only a snapshot of current team performance, but also proactively suggesting the small front line actions that can add up to better guest experiences, these tools go from simply being reactive reporting, to proactive performance improvers.

When they are successful in providing all the little touches that can make these occasions feel so special, such as was done by the Red Robin manager, then it’s become increasingly important for restaurants to provide these happy customers with an easy way to share their stories with their friends.

Again, this is where a well thought out CEM solution can come into play. By their very nature, these solutions will be able to help you identify and filter out your happiest customers. By taking that as a starting point, and providing those same happy customers with an easy way to share great experiences, CEM can become an ideal platform to generate the type of positive social sentiment that most brands deserve, but unfortunately don’t get.

You should get credit for your efforts! After all, you work hard every day with the hope that your guests will share their great experience.

Speech-to-Text: Artificial Intelligence for Genuine VoC

Siri

Chances are, you have already heard about Apple’s infamous iPhone personality. Through extensive marketing campaigns, Apple unveiled Siri, a feature that allows users to interact with their phone by speaking to it. Yes, that’s right, by speaking to your phone.

Say you wanted to know what the weather was going to look like, all you would have to do is say to your phone, “Weather.” Your phone then proceeds to reply with the weather forecast in your area. Want to check how busy your day is? Just ask, “What’s my day look like?” Your phone will then report your day. Is Siri the beginning of pocket artificial intelligence? It (she?) very well may be.

Why am I talking about Siri? Because Siri demonstrates the real-life application of some very cool speech-to-text technology. Speech-to-text is the ability of a computer to transcribe spoken language into usable text. This type of technological ability is very new but maturing rapidly.

Watson

Yet another famous piece of artificial intelligence that you’ve likely heard of, Watson is an IBM supercomputer that gained wide acclaim by appearing on Jeopardy! and defeating two of the game show’s top champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

Over three days of trivia, Watson racked up $77,147, whereas Ken and Brad took in $24,000 and $21,600 respectively. As the Jeopardy! clues were being displayed visually to the other two contestants, Watson was receiving them through a direct text feed. Once the text was input, Watson didn’t just recognize the words, he (it?) understood how they related to each other. With that understanding, he analyzed 200 million pages of information to find the correct answer—all in the time it takes to sneeze.

Is Watson the first step toward machines taking over the world? Quite the opposite, actually. The IBM technology that fuels Watson has the potential to be one of this generation’s greatest allies. It’s already being used to improve the medical diagnosis process by combining symptoms, family history, current medications, doctor’s notes, and other information to suggest a diagnosis.

Speech-to-Text

If you want the analytical powers of a supercomputer like Watson (and, trust me, you do), you need text. In a world that still communicates verbally first and written second, we need more than a computer with Watson’s brain; we need one with Siri’s ears.

That’s the role of Speech-to-Text. Combine an advanced speech-to-text engine with an analytical supercomputer and you have the key to immense possibilities. In an article written by Jon Gertner and published in Fast Company, the author builds on the words of IBM’s chief of research, John Kelly, to point out this very thing:

“IBM executives have come to believe that Watson represents the first machine of the third computer age, a category now referred to within the company as cognitive computing. As Kelly describes it, the first generation of computers were tabulating machines that added up figures. ‘The second generation,’ he says, ‘were the programmable systems—the mainframe, the first IBM 360, PCs, all the computers we have today.’ Now, Kelly believes, we’ve arrived at the cognitive moment—a moment of true artificial intelligence. These computers, such as Watson, can recognize important content within language, both written and spoken. They do not ask us to communicate with them in their coded language; they speak ours.”

InMoment

We live and breathe the voice of the customer (VoC) trade every day. We collect millions of surveys every month from the individual customers of our clients. We have held the benefits of speech-to-text and IBM Watson technology in our hands. And they are stunning.

Using these universal-grade systems, our ability to analyze customer surveys and reviews for real-time, actionable insights has leapt forward to include all unstructured, unsolicited feedback across multiple written and spoken world languages.

Let me walk you through just one scenario: a phone survey. Last year, we collected 113,000 phone surveys for one of our clients. To put that in perspective, it would take that client 1,000 hours a year to listen to every survey—that’s one full-time employee listening to surveys non-stop for six months, and that doesn’t even take into account the time involved with organizing, analyzing, and reporting the results!

Is this how you plan on hearing your customers? Is it even worth it to listen to your customers anyway?

Yes. It is. The reality is, you can’t afford not to. When business analysts are telling you to care about every single one of your customers, they are not just speaking ethically, they are speaking financially. The quality and quantity of research on the matter has now made it undeniable.

Using Forrester’s customer experience index (CXi), for instance, statistics bear out the fact that U.S. businesses maintaining above-average CXi scores make millions, if not billions, more each year than businesses maintaining below-average CXi scores. The key to a high CXi? Listening and responding to customer feedback (Forrester, “The Business Impact Of Customer Experience, 2012,” referenced here). Recent studies have also shown that customer retention efforts are more profitable than those to acquire new customers (Bain & Company, “The Economics of Loyalty”).

At InMoment, we provide the tools to capture and use the voice of the customer in real time. This includes both speech-to-text and IBM analytics, two of the most powerful technologies the business world has ever seen.

Your customers expect to be heard individually and addressed personally. The Speech-to-Text and IBM content analytics we use at InMoment make that possible.

What Makes You Different? How to Get Strategic Insights from Feedback

We live in an age of information. More than just an interesting sounding catchphrase, businesses today are sitting on vast amounts of data, more than any other point in history. Data tracking internal processes, data tracking supply chains, and data tracking customers amongst others.

Naturally, customer feedback is a part of that. While a simple feedback survey seems quite straightforward from the outside, when you think about the amount of data that can be generated through a typical customer experience management (CEM) program, the numbers can quickly become quite impressive. Most programs will receive 30 or more responses per month per location. For a brand with 250 locations that means close to 100,000 customer surveys each year. If you consider that most surveys will be made up of 20 or more questions, then suddenly if you’re a customer experience program manager you’re looking at 2 million individual points of customer feedback.

The question is – What insights are locked inside all of that data?

Some are obvious, location comparisons, average performance, overall scores, trending etc… answers to those questions have always been the biggest values of a CEM program. In fact if a program is well designed and the questions asked are of an appropriate nature, these are exactly the type of insights that can drive great brands to continue executing on a day-to-day basis.

But 2 million points of data are a lot. What else might be hidden in that data? Sometimes there’s more to the data than just the surface level trends, it just takes a bit of deeper analysis to get to it. Today’s technology tools allow anyone with a deeper level of curiosity to dig deeper and discover some of the additional layers of nuance within pools of customer survey data.

Some more nuanced questions that can be answered with customer survey data would include:

  • Which factors in the experience hold the most weight when measured against overall satisfaction?
  • How overall satisfaction is perceived across different demographic segments?
  • How different product categories impact satisfaction?
  • How can I measure a cross section of all of these questions looking at products and their impact against satisfaction across different demographics?

The challenge is being able to segment the data appropriately and easily. That’s where a flexible data analysis product can come in handy. Rather than having to rely on external resources program managers should be empowered to be able to quickly slice out interesting segments of customer feedback to make informed decisions. Or at least be able to use these slices of data to be able to follow a single train of thought through to some kind of conclusion or hypothesis.

In today’s world having data is no longer enough. We need to be able to harness the power of actually using it, to be able to effectively drive change.

Giving Customers a Voice

It is one of the oldest adages in business — “the customer is always right.” While this is true in most circumstances, there is also the missing other side of that statement that holds true too — “customers want to be heard.”

This is supported by the consumer insights research that we do here at Empathica. Interestingly we have found that most customers are willing to provide feedback to the brands they frequent in some manner. In fact, a recent consumer insights study we ran showed that up to 85% of consumers are willing to provide feedback to the restaurants and retailers they frequent.

That same research also uncovered an interesting disconnect however. Of those same consumers polled, only 46% believe their feedback is used to improve the customer experience.

This shows on one hand a real desire from customers to become a more active part of the brands where they shop and dine. On the other hand, the current perception consumers have is that brands do not share a desire to listen to the feedback being provided.

Brands can do a lot to change this perception by adopting some simple habits in how they build dialogue and connect with their customers. Here are some of our tips that may be helpful to you and your business, gleamed from Empathica working with leading brands for over a decade:

Creating a dialogue is not only asking for feedback but also acknowledging that you’re listening and using your customers’ voices to improve.

Everyone can relate to the frustration of feeling as though you’re not being heard. CEM programs at their core are all about using customer feedback to improve your business. Make sure you’re using the most of your customer feedback and actually making improvements with it and not just allowing it to collect dust.

Upset or at risk customers can be acknowledged and helped, and delighted customers should get a chance to tell the world through social media.

Acknowledging customers directly who have either very good or very poor experiences can be a powerful way to build loyalty through direct interactions. Well thought-out CEM programs should have the ability to allow managers to intervene when a customer has a very poor experience, as well as allowing very positive experiences to be shared with staff as a motivational tool.

Feedback can also be shared in a more public manner.

Some brands have even gone so far as to publicly share their feedback scores on corporate websites and other assets. For brands that are successfully running advocacy programs, why not embed those messages directly into your website or other only marketing activities to truly turn the voice of your customers into your marketing message.

It doesn’t need to be said but customers really are the lifeblood of any business. For brands to acknowledge this fact and make them feel a part of your growth and success requires that businesses of all shapes and sizes do a better job of listening to them. That’s where a well thought out customer experience management program can play a role. After all, customer feedback is all about better listening.

Data Evolution: Arriving at Action

DATA: Facts & Statistics

What is data and why would I want it?

I remember learning the secret of what “data” means and being very unimpressed with what I learned. I was in a business information systems class when the teacher put this definition up on the board:

Da•ta noun: 1. Facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis.

My teacher then went on to confuse me by saying data is useless. Well, it took me a while to care enough to figure out why data is useless, but I get it now: You don’t want data; you want information.

INFORMATION: Data with Context

Information is data with context. Context, in this case, means clarifying elements like date, time, location, etc. These bits of contextual reference change data into information. What my teacher said makes sense, then—who would want data when they can have information!

But there’s still such a thing as “information overload” (turns out it’s not actually all that helpful to go from “too much data” to “too much contextual data”). Even once we’ve transformed our piles of data into piles of information, we still can’t make decisions. We still can’t act!

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE: Information Organized

The next evolution arose from this inability to make decisions. Business Intelligence (BI) is the industry’s attempt to manage the information overload. BI systems are designed to process huge amounts of information in a way that helps get you closer to a decision.

When I think of a BI system, I envision a bunch of technicians in lab coats working around a giant machine (think Wizard of Oz). Despite the fact that these technicians are neatly organizing your information, the main problem persists:

You aren’t being led to a final decision! You are still only being shown a more refined form of data. Why? Because the people researching the questions are not the people who need the answers. The disconnect between the researcher and the end user is the problem.

To get to the solution, it takes one more evolutionary step. The person with the question must be empowered to find answers, make decisions, and act!

ACTIONABLE INTELLIGENCE: BI Distilled to a Decision

Actionable Intelligence (AI) is the distillation of complex Business Intelligence down into its salient pieces. For a store manager or a call center manager, this translates to direct and predictive recommendations about specific problems.

Mindshare’s Local Dashboard (Coach™) is an example of an AI system for your people at the point of service (customer service representatives). Wherever the rubber meets the road—that’s where AI excels. Give the right information at the right time, in a format that can be acted on by the person who can make a difference. That’s what Actionable Intelligence is all about.

Mindshare Technologies works with various predictive technologies that can manipulate huge amounts of Business Intelligence, distill it, and distribute it as Actionable Intelligence. Check it out!

If You Want to Develop a Great Brand, Ask the Right Questions

Customer feedback is not about numbers; it’s about delivering great customer experiences. Empowering each frontline staff member to deliver great experiences is the best way to differentiate your brand in a challenging economy. Consumers remain cautious and selective about where they spend their money, so exceeding their expectations is more important for brand success than ever.

Great customer experiences can drive active advocacy. In fact, 69% of consumers are willing to share great experiences with their friends and family. The best CEM programmes capture the unique ‘essence’ of your brand and help operators to understand why their customers become advocates and how to harness the power of recommendations.

Let’s start at the very beginning. You need to gain a deep understanding of what a great experience looks and more importantly feels like for your customers. What drives people to your brand? What causes them to be loyal and become advocates? What experiences will they share with friends and family?

But which questions are going to give you the customer insight you need to make your brand stand out from the competition? Customer engagement is an over-used phrase but you do need to connect with your customers at an emotional level to understand what really makes them tick. There’s a world of difference between asking whether a store appeared clean and whether the customer felt it to be welcoming and inviting. The right questions should always be personal to both your brand and your customers.

So, once you’ve gained insight into what your customers really feel and want, how are you going to harness this knowledge to give your brand a competitive advantage? It’s easy to try to be the best at everything – but unfortunately, this isn’t usually an achievable goal. You need to focus on your own brand strengths and exploit competitors’ weaknesses.

Let’s take a fast food restaurant example. Restaurant A may score highly on factors such as menu variety, speed of service and price. But Restaurant B could tap into the market opportunity to produce high-quality food delivered with exceptional service in an extremely welcoming environment. The food may be a little more pricey and it may take longer to prepare – but most customers appreciate that you generally get what you pay for. As the saying goes, all good things come to he who waits.

It’s only by asking the right questions that you can gain valuable insight into what real customers think and feel about your brand, giving you the knowledge you need to help your brand succeed. The best CEM programmes help brands to stay ahead of the competition by empowering them to turn research into experiential reality.

Advocacy and Auto Dealers

It’s been said before but it’s worth saying again. The Internet has changed the way consumers make purchasing decisions. The vast quantity of information online has shifted power into the hands of consumers when it comes to how educated they can be before making a purchase.

In no industry is this more apparent than in the automotive sector.

In my own recent experience, I spent many hours researching before making a new car purchase. Not only did I go through traditional sources like magazine and newspaper reviews, I also joined a few Facebook fan pages and online forums. It was from the owner fan pages in social media where I was able to get some very direct pro and con advice from a large pool of owners of the cars I was most interested in. Many owners were also quite open about sharing pricing information and negotiation advice.

Best of all was all the research that I was able to conduct entirely on my own without the influence of the manufacturers.

By the time I got around to test driving a few cars I knew exactly what I wanted and the price I was willing to pay. On top of that I also knew, from all the owner advice I got, what to expect and what to look out for once the test drive began. I was a buyer with a much higher level of education and comfort in the product – that would have been unheard of only a few years ago!

In this new world it’s clear that car manufacturers face a huge challenge when it comes to attracting customers to physically come visit their dealer lots. There is a huge opportunity however in online channels where dealers can leverage owners to provide user testimonies to encourage others like myself to visit the dealers who provided them with a great product surrounded by great experiences. Message to dealers: turn happy customers into active advocates.

This is an organic marketing process that some dealers are beginning to explore with impressive results.

In just 90 days one American dealer who kicked off an advocacy initiative engaged with over 726 customers who visited their website, service department, and sales department. Their effort uncovered 126 advocates that communicated their personal and authentic dealer recommendations to over 16,377 people in just 3 months.

Rather than relying exclusively on traditional advertising channels to attract new customers it’s clear that it can be equally, if not more, effective to use today’s social channels to build a base of new customers by leveraging your best asset…the customers you already have.

Customer Experience by the Numbers: Real, Profitable Results

Customer feedback has immense value.

We’ve been saying that (and, might I add, proving it) for years. And its immense value is only ever realized once insights have been extracted and strategies have been executed to create a powerful customer experience. Anyone who’s worked with Mindshare should recognize the process I just described.

The service we provide our clients has worked well in the past, it’s working wonderfully now, and, according to the numbers, it will work even better in the future. That’s right, some new big numbers have come across my desk in the recent weeks, and it’s sharing time!

In a report titled “The Business Impact Of Customer Experience, 2012,” Forrester writer Megan Burns presents extensive research and the latest findings to reaffirm and quantify the revenue advantages that a company like Mindshare Technologies can offer today’s service companies.*

As usual, Forrester is following all the best practices you’ve come to expect from them, using a sample size of nearly eight thousand U.S. consumers and accounting for gaps between the number of people who say they will do something and the number of people who actually do. In short, the numbers I’m about to share represent a very realistic representation of the full market opportunity for companies who employ a dedicated Voice of the Customer (VoC) service provider.

The report presents detailed portrayals of 12 different industries, including airlines, retailers, TV service providers, hotels, banks, wireless service providers, and medical insurers. Using Forrester’s own customer experience index (CXi), statistics bear out the fact that U.S. businesses maintaining above-average CXi scores make millions, if not billions, more each year than businesses maintaining below-average CXi scores.

In the report, the revenue advantages enjoyed by these top companies are attributed to three areas strongly tied to the customer experience and customer loyalty (this is where the money is):

1. Additional purchases

Forrester found a high correlation between consumers’ CXi rating of a company and their willingness to buy from the company again. Similarly, they found an inverse correlation between a brand’s CXi score and customers’ likelihood to switch business away, which means that the better the customers’ experiences, the lower the number of customers looking to defect.

2. Churn reduction

Forrester models show that revenue lost by low CXi, and retained by good CXi, can reach up to $825 million for hotels, where customer volume is extremely high.

3. Word of mouth

Forrester found that firms can see incremental sales from positive word of mouth that range from $2 million for retailers to $65 million for airlines (where a variety of social media sites, such as Flyertalk.com, help create extensive word of mouth).

It’s also important to remember that the Forrester models in this report only account for revenues gained from having a better customer experience. As shown in previous Forrester reports, other significant bottom-line gains can be achieved through improved operations that save millions in excess sales and service costs.

For companies to build a top service experience in their industry—and to claim the available revenue—they must be in tune with their existing customers, and aware of their operations at every level.

Mindshare Technologies continues to partner with companies who understand these principles, and we’re happy to see real revenues resulting from increased attentiveness to customers. Across the business world, good behavior is being reinforced and rewarded. Hooray for that!

*For a full copy of the report, visit the Forrester site.

Change Region

Selecting a different region will change the language and content of inmoment.com

North America
United States/Canada (English)
Europe
DACH (Deutsch) United Kingdom (English)
Asia Pacific
Australia (English) New Zealand (English) Asia (English)